since donations have dried up a little bit (thanks anyway!), I decided that I will switch to a lower-cost server sometime next week. The new server will save us 20€ per month while the hardware is almost the same - the CPU being a little less powerful while we actually get an upgrade to enterprise-level HDDs! Everything will essentially stay the same. I expect the downtime to be at most a couple of hours but it could extend to a whole day, depending on arising problems.

Anyways, I'd like to take the opportunity to get a discussion started on the future of TSP. While we still get a good amount of traffic and player numbers are somewhat stable around the 150 players mark, it is clear that the party cannot go on forever. I'm happy to leave the site as-is and leave it centered on FL. On the other hand, the latest poll has shown that there would be interest in Star Citizen modding or other games. We don't really have the resources to do anything drastic with the site currently, but I'd still like to hear some opinions on this.

Personally, I think we missed the opportunity of becoming a multi-game website. There is now spacesimcentral.com which covers pretty much all space sims in detail. Also, Star Citizen modding is at least 2 years away. I'm not sure what's up with Elite Dangerous and modding or even private servers. Limit theory is interesting but only singleplayer. Infinity will start their Kickstarter soon but then it will be at least a few more years until anything substantial IMO.

So in conclusion, I think its best to just keep the focus on FL and just hope for a source code release (haha) or the end of DirectPlay support in Windows 11..

Huh ) Secondary the site must be about emulators Multigame with focus on FL i think. Because good names like Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous will give more visitors and also ppl with classic questions: where to get fl cd, which mod better to play, is there alternative storyline or continue of the game

I actually looked a little bit into cheap VPS servers but in the end, it is currently not worth it for us as FF mentioned. Not only are the space limits too small most of the time, as soon as you want more than like 2 GB of RAM you already pay over 20 or 30$ - at which point Hetzner's dedicated server offers are simply way better (~33 USD at current exchange rate for i7 4 core CPU with 16 GB RAM and dual 3 TB enterprise HDDs with 20 TB traffic). Also, since TSP runs in a VM, I can simply copy over the VM to the new Hetzner server so for now its the easier option.

The source code mention was a joke. As regards other games, I dont see us expanding because that would require staff actually posting news and maintaining other game sections which we simply dont have.

Well, you guys obviously knowing much better than me about the back of this web site.

On the other hand....

I used to run a small Chinese comunity long before, which share same topic with spacesimcentral.com. And it's larger than spacesimcentral.com in amount of post & replies. (But quality is low I have to say)

We don't have staffs at that time, only moderators who also contribute contents like MODs and Tips. But most contents is contributed by users.

I'm not saying the community is healthy, but it shows that web site run by user generated content is workable (Technically, this web site is mostly UGC'ed too). So you may no need that many staffs you expected.

Of course, it will be a quality issue but I think it could be resolved by appropriate community management. (You have to discover it yourself)

Even you need to post news and keep track updates by yourselfs, it's just cost few hours every week. (Writing news is not rock science, not in this topic)

And ..... well, Xoops sucks. Article is difficult to categorize and read, download is not easy to use, only thing that relatively useable is the forum...Lot of good web application come out those years: Wordpress is good one and not just a blog, and Forum application like VanillaForums, esoTalk, Discourse (SEO may sucks), Flarum (SEO sucks), every each one is far better than PHPBB.Consider to move to another application if you want to change direction of this website maybe?

I know i've been absent from the FL community for a number of years now, so my opinions on TSP's direction maybe of little value (it was quite a relief seeing that it was still online), but IMO branching off into other related games could be a good thing. As NeXoSE said, alot of news and such will be generated by users, and some of the more worthy may even make for suitable staff. A influx of new users from other gaming communities may even help revitalize FL a bit, when they see the large amount of content here and get that nostalgia feeling. However, it will probably take a substantial push to get the momentum going. Of course the focus should probably remain on FL, as the information located here really is quite extensive and most of it is not available anywhere else.

And ..... well, Xoops sucks. Article is difficult to categorize and read, download is not easy to use, only thing that relatively useable is the forum...Lot of good web application come out those years: Wordpress is good one and not just a blog, and Forum application like VanillaForums, esoTalk, Discourse (SEO may sucks), Flarum (SEO sucks), every each one is far better than PHPBB.Consider to move to another application if you want to change direction of this website maybe?

This is good point and I think its a good mid-term goal to ditch Xoops completely and replace it i.e. with a vanilla forum. We can still have the Wiki and the Forge as seperate entities of the site, the only valuable thing we'd lose is the downloads module but that is crap anyways.. I'm not sure if there are any good download database solutions out there though.